I HATE to whine, but if Michael Douglas is half as tired of playing yuppie scum as I am of watching him do it, then he must be napping on a regular basis by now.

In "Wall Street," "Fatal Attraction," "The War of the Roses" and "The Game," he worked his way through raping the economy, philandering, selfishness and general weakness of character, honing his skills as an actor so that, at last, he could play a guy who is out and out bad.

In "A Perfect Murder," he is Steven Taylor, a rich financial wizard with the scruples of a rabbit in mating season. He finds himself in the awkward position of near ruin after a series of ill-advised illegal trades start to go wrong.

Luckily, he is married to the young and beautiful Emily (Gwyneth Paltrow), who happens to be worth $100 million. Does the loving husband ask his wife to bail him out? No. He pays someone to have her killed for the inheritence. Not the choice the average guy would have made, but that's what makes yuppie scum yuppie scum.

And it's not just anyone he hires to do the job. The person he selects is Emily's lover, David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen of "G.I. Jane" ), a sexy, sullen and fashionably unshaven downtown artist. He has been sleeping with Emily, with more lust for her fortune than for her body. So far, Emily is batting 1.000 in the Judgment of Men department. David is an ex-con who has pulled the same scam with vulnerable rich women before.

Knowing this, Steven threatens to expose David to the authorities in Florida, where he is being sought on fraud charges, unless David agrees to a murder plot that has much in common with Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 "Dial M for Murder," on which Patrick Smith Kelly's script is loosely based.

The fun of that Grace Kelly-Ray Milland thriller was at least partly owing to the interplay between the husband and a clever police inspector. Here the equivalent cop is played by David Suchet (TV's Poirot). Director Andrew Davis ( "The Fugitive" ) makes a huge mistake by allowing Suchet to excite the audience with the intensity of his presence and then removing Suchet from most of the proceedings.

The actor's quiet intelligence makes the one-dimensional characterizations of Douglas and Mortensen, who are both good enough actors under most circumstances, seem the work of acting students struggling to complete tough homework assignments.

But that has more to do with the nature of a big, dumb Hollywood movie copying so many other big, dumb Hollywood movies than it does with the performances themselves. What can actors do who want to assure their status in the industry and, it follows, support the lavish lifestyles that inevitably ensue, but appear in high-budget, slick entertainments like this?

Paltrow, too, is generally a good actress but there is a paint-by-numbers quality to her work here. She played a victim reasonably well in "Hush" and now she's doing it again. What are we supposed to say? Brava?

And not that a movie like this deserves such careful dissection, but there's a little business with a key that would only make sense dramatically if it took place earlier in the movie. But who cares? The filmmakers sure didn't.